Profile Information

Active affiliate marketer and recently made the jump from agency work to freelancing.

Blog Bio:

Sebastian Cowie is a freelance SEO consultant and Director of SC Digital LTD. He recently made the jump from an agency environment to focus on advanced link building tactics and content marketing strategies.

Since the inception of Penguin and Panda, SEOs have been shifting from link building strategies that may have involved anything from mass article submissions, social bookmarking, directory submissions in bulk, purchasing links, as well as other frowned upon strategies and have recently jumped on the guest posting bandwagon.

Nice to see someone succeed after a penalty has been given. I removed the best part of 80% of a backlink profile and submitted 6 different reconsideration requests over a period of 3 months. All failed.

In the end we started the site on a new domain and had it ranking better than before within 2 months. Should have just done that from the get go!

I'm a huge fan of fiverr. Had my logo dont there and a few other bits and bobs. As long as you go to fiverr knowing you're not going to find high quality guest posts, or 100% white hat backlinks you'll be fine.

I understand your frustration. I'm sure we've all been there at one time or another!

Allow me to put a spin on your "what is better" statement though: 20 generic e-mails with 10 replies on standard sites that accept most posts, or 10 personal ones with 5 replies from high profile sites.

Thanks for your comment, judging by the frequency of pitches that I'm still receiving that fall afoul of these tips, there are a large number of consultants that are still guest posting with a "throw everything at it and see what sticks" approach.

SEO's need to up their game as guest posting shouldn't be viewed as article marketing 2.0. I think part of the issue revolves around a deliverables based system, rather than a result based system. So consumers are still recovering from the "you'll receive x amount of links per month" instead of "we'll try to get in touch with high quality sites, that are a perfect match for your business".

I'm currently going through a similar process for one of my clients. He'd previously purchased all sorts of low quality links and after removing ~75% of the links I'd assumed that would be enough good faith in Google's eyes to get a reconsideration request approved.

Unfortunately it wasn't so the number is now 85% with the remaining offending links disavowed. Fingers crossed that it works this time.

Queue the influx of people submitting reviews to wordstream ;) In all seriousness, it's great to see people using ego-bait and providing examples. It makes convincing clients that directories and social bookmarks really are a thing of the past and real work is involved in creating quality links!

Great post, and the video from Gary is hilarious. Link building is definitely going down a different route and long term ethical strategies are what we all need to build from here on in. I think linklove yesterday enforced the fact that it's about being as creative and as different as possible to stand out from the crowd.

This article really hit home for me. It stems from the general assumption that Romany Gypsies and Romanians are the same. Whenever a news story portrays Romany's as Romanians it just adds to the stereotype as well as causing an increase in uneducated searches which further fans the flames of negative searches.

The amount of data disappearing seems to be increasing each week. An entertainment site that I run has a "not provided" level of 7% compared to 0.6% last month. This has no real effect on my bottom line but it's skewing the most popular items of content on the site and leaving me a little bit blind as to what to write about next.

One minute we're told to engage our users and write high quality pieces then our no.1 tool for finding out what people are interested in on your site is taken away from us. Poor form :(